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Tuesday, January 27, 2026

01/27 Links Pt1: The Hostage Crisis Is Over. So What Has the World Learned?; Netanyahu: Israeli soldiers lost their lives in Gaza due to Biden-era arms embargo; PIJ knowingly fired faulty rockets in Gaza, killing 'a thousand' Palestinians

From Ian:

Seth Mandel: The Hostage Crisis Is Over. So What Has the World Learned?
Much like Hamas’s strategy of operating from civilian homes, hostage-taking is part of what Palestinian terrorists see as Israel’s chief vulnerability: that it cares about the life and dignity of every individual. In other words, the conflict we see today is, zoomed out, a Palestinian war to exploit Israel’s humanity. Why anyone thinks a conflict that is set along these lines can or will be solved by turning artificial borders into official ones is beyond me. No one who kidnaps babies is interested in real estate.

And second: what Avera Mengistu’s story revealed. Apparently grief-stricken over the loss of his brother, and undergoing periodic mental-health treatment, the 28-year-old climbed over a border fence and into Gaza in 2014. He was returned in 2025.

Who holds a grief-stricken, mentally ill person hostage for a decade? Hamas does.

Nor is the danger of such aimless walking limited to Gaza. Here’s a headline from late December: “IDF escorts Israeli woman out of Palestinian West Bank town she entered.” There really wasn’t much more to the story. A military statement read: “After IDF troops scanned the area, the forces located the civilian and extracted her safely out of the village.”

When did headlines about Israelis having to be extracted from Palestinian neighborhoods become so dog-bites-man?

Here’s one from a week earlier: “Mentally ill Israeli extracted safely from Hebron overnight after wandering for hours.” Jews are only permitted in about 20 percent of Hebron. If one enters the other 80 percent, it makes headlines no matter what happens to them.

This one’s from less than two weeks ago: “Israeli and PA forces extract Jewish man seen wandering in West Bank city of Qalqilya.” Sounds dangerous; what happened? “An initial investigation has found that the man entered the city to go to a car repair shop.”

Another from late December: “Troops extract 2 Israelis who entered West Bank’s Area A near Hebron, Nablus.”

The case of Avera Mengistu highlights the fact that still, after all these decades of “peace” negotiations, the Judenrein nature of Palestinian Arab towns is simply accepted to the point where nearly every headline about an Israeli leaving such a town alive contains a version of the word “extraction.”

The October 7 hostage crisis is over. But has the world learned any of the lessons that have been on display since it began?
Jonathan Sacerdoti: How Israel did the impossible – and brought the hostages home
To outside observers, these goals sound impossible. But bringing back all the hostages was dismissed as impossible, too. Israel did it. These promises may sound arbitrary, idealistic, even performative, but to Israel, nothing is too dramatic. It is a country whose history has read like a thriller from its earliest days, whose survival has defied odds at every turn. A people whose annihilation has been attempted repeatedly by armies larger, better armed, and more numerous, often backed by far broader coalitions.

It is tempting to reach for biblical or spiritual explanations. Perhaps they have their place. Not everyone’s taste runs in that direction. What can be said, without mysticism, is that human beings united by purpose, driven by pain and fury, and threatened by brutality can achieve things that appear impossible from a distance.

Anyone in doubt can look at a map and trace a finger to that narrow sliver of land so many have sought to erase. It is still there. It does not get everything right. It argues, stumbles, fractures. Yet it persists, and it fights to defend its existence. Yesterday, it delivered on one impossible promise. The second now waits.

This is where the American role becomes decisive, and often misunderstood. The US initiative on Gaza should not be read as a naรฏve development plan or a humanitarian fantasy. Its headline promises of employment, reconstruction and futuristic redevelopment are not about realism. They are about framing.

Washington has placed a maximal, almost utopian offer on the table precisely because it expects it to fail. The point is to force a binary choice. Either Gaza, and Palestinians more generally, move decisively away from armed jihadist governance, towards demilitarisation and external oversight, or they absorb the consequences of continued war and isolation. The message is blunt: everything is being offered. Rejection transfers responsibility.

This strategy buys time. Even a temporary pause delays large-scale fighting, reduces Israeli casualties, and allows further consolidation of the diplomatic case against Hamas. It exposes bad faith. It drains sympathy. It reframes the conflict as one of Palestinian political choice rather than Israeli obstruction. Or so the US may hope.

Governance proposals emerging from Washington reflect this pragmatism. There is no search for a morally pure Palestinian leadership. Any figure with local standing will carry factional history. The aim is a technocratic authority operationally reliant on external backing, financially constrained, and removable if it drifts towards Hamas. Disarmament is the price of reconstruction. According to the agreements signed at least, there is no flexibility on that point. Israel will wish to hold the US to that promise.

Demilitarisation remains the true red line. If Hamas refuses, the strategy should shift. Opening the border with Egypt functions as a pressure valve: population movement reduces Hamas’s ability to embed itself behind civilians. Israel gains greater freedom of action, with fewer civilian entanglements and clearer international justification.

More broadly, Gaza itself is not the central strategic theatre. Iran remains the core concern, with Turkey hovering uneasily on the edge of hostility and opportunism. The American military posture signals as much to Tehran as to Gaza. That many European states have chosen to stand on the sidelines and scoff at President Trump’s plans, even as atrocities unfold elsewhere in the region, only underscores how marginal they have become.

What is clear is this: Israel has delivered on one impossible promise. The second is now being tested, under harsher conditions, with fewer illusions. Whether demilitarisation can be achieved will determine not only Gaza’s future, but the credibility of every promise made since October.

History offers no guarantees. It rarely does. But it does record moments when nations, bound by pain, pressure, and purpose, achieved what seemed implausible. Israel has reached such a moment again. What follows will not be symbolic. It will be decisive.


Mark Dubowitz: Israel’s hostage agony finally ends — but its Gaza mission is far from over
The world should take Israel at its word.

This is a country that mobilized its citizen army on an unprecedented scale, fought house-to-house through Hamas’ booby-trapped strongholds and absorbed staggering losses.

A nation willing to sacrifice this much will not accept half-measures, cosmetic victories or temporary fixes.

Nor should it.

Yet Hamas still demands a full Israeli withdrawal and renewed access to the outside world via the Gaza-Egypt border, clinging to the illusion that it can survive, regroup and strike again.

That fantasy must be crushed.

Trump on Monday made it clear he’s on the same page as Israel in that regard.

“Now we have to disarm Hamas,” he stated after Gvili’s body was recovered.

Yet Hamas itself pointed to Gvili’s mournful homecoming as evidence that it’s ready to play a role in “facilitating the work” of Gaza’s new transitional government.

This cannot happen.

Its call to be involved with Gaza’s new government represents a dangerous bid for the terrorist organization’s survival under a new name.

No one in Washington should be fooled.

The United States should not grant these vicious terrorists who perpetrated the worst murder of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust any say in Gaza’s future.

Trump must not allow these killers a chance to slyly dodge disarmament by integrating itself into the administration of Palestinian technocrats now tasked with running the strip.

Additionally, the regional mediators — Qatar, Egypt and Turkey — must stop indulging Hamas and start confronting it.

In so doing, they should reassess their own reflexive hostility toward Israel and recognize the region’s emerging reality: Israel is now the Middle East’s preeminent military and moral power.

Trump and his administration deserves credit for making hostage recovery a strategic priority.

But Washington must also remain clear-eyed: Hamas’ promises to help rebuild and govern Gaza are worthless.

A jihadist organization whose core mission is Israel’s destruction cannot be a partner in peace.

This is not a symmetrical conflict — and any diplomatic framework that pretends otherwise is doomed.

The foundation of a lasting settlement must be Israel’s existential security: Hamas dismantled, Gaza demilitarized, and Iran’s terror networks and nuclear and ballistic missile programs crushed.

Not eventually. Permanently.


Seth Frantzman: Saudi Arabia’s changing strategy and the quiet strain with the UAE
It’s not always clear what happened behind the scenes, but Saudi Arabia has shifted its policies slightly. It has become more critical of Israel. It’s possible that the Gaza War changed perceptions in Riyadh.

It’s also possible that anti-Saudi comments by one of the members of the ruling coalition in Jerusalem changed Riyadh’s calculations. Another factor may have been Saudi Arabia’s sense that Israel was growing too strong, in the wake of airstrikes on Doha only months after the Iran-Israel conflict.

Saudi Arabia was a key conduit for introducing Syria’s transitional leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, to US President Donald Trump.

When voices in Jerusalem threatened to bomb Damascus, and one Israeli politician even suggested eliminating the Syrian president, Riyadh may have felt that Israel was becoming a source of instability in the region. Riyadh wants stability, not more wars.

These changing attitudes and the rift with Abu Dhabi likely have ramifications. Saudi Arabia is a strong country and a key US ally as well as a major buyer of US defense products.

It feels that it should be respected and that it has a role to play in the region’s stability. If it senses Jerusalem is not taking Saudi Arabia’s counsel seriously, either via intermediaries or possibly directly, then it’s plausible this will shift regional dynamics.

Israeli officials tend to think Saudi Arabia is rapidly becoming a major power in the region. Speeches have indicated this sense of Israel being a regional and global power.

Other statements by Israel’s Prime Minister, about the country being a kind of “super-Sparta,” are certainly being read in Saudi Arabia. Riyadh likely recalls that the UAE was referred to as “little Sparta” years ago as it played a growing role in places like Yemen.

Saudi Arabia possibly feels, like Greek city-states did in the lead-up to the Peloponnesian War, that having too powerful Athens or Sparta was a problem. Israel’s recognition of Somaliland, for instance, likely strains relations.

As Israel or the UAE are perceived as trying to remake the region and also back various non-state groups, Riyadh appears more and more concerned. Support for Syria and the Yemen government are manifestations of Saudi Arabia’s policy.

Along with Turkey, it’s possible it is also concerned about a new round of fighting with Iran. Saudi Arabia also may feel it has been pushed out of its traditional role in Lebanon. All of this adds up, and it may bring the UAE and Israel closer, but it may cause the Abraham Accords to remain as they are, without expansion.
Saudi normalization with Israel: Is it farther than ever?
The Saudi sense of strategic abandonment dates back to 2019, when Iran struck Saudi Aramco facilities, and the Trump administration chose not to respond militarily.

For Riyadh, this was a shock. Historically, such an attack would have triggered a US response to defend a critical ally and a vital energy supplier.

Searching for partners against an expansionist Iranian Shi’ite regime – one that despises Saudi Arabia and resents its custodianship of Mecca and Medina – the Saudis increasingly looked to Israel.

Quiet cooperation on intelligence, missile defense, cybersecurity, and innovation was already underway. Normalization would have elevated all of it. October 7 ended that first chapter.

Fast-forward to 2026, seven months after the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, conducted with American support. Iran today is wounded and strategically constrained. For Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, the immediate Iranian threat has receded.

As a result, Riyadh calculates that public alignment with Israel, especially after years of inflammatory imagery from Gaza, is no longer urgent. Chapter two has begun, but the Crown Prince currently sees more risk than reward.

Those risks are internal. MBS has powerful enemies within the royal family who have not forgotten his consolidation of power, including the imprisonment of rival princes during the 2017 Ritz-Carlton purge.

When King Salman passes, knives, figurative and political, will come out.

MBS understands this dynamic and has made a calculated choice: to neutralize rivals by adopting a harder public line on Israel, embracing anti-Zionist sentiment among Saudi youth, and championing Palestinian statehood.

This denies his rivals political space. He has gone further by warming ties with Turkey, a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned state, and flirting with a security alignment involving Pakistan, partners that should concern Washington.

Against this backdrop, President Donald Trump should reconsider offering Saudi Arabia advanced F-35 fighters absent firm guarantees about succession and long-term strategic alignment.

Saudi Arabia remains governed by Wahhabi Islam, tempered since 9/11 but still dominant. The question must be asked plainly: should America provide its most advanced weaponry to a state where Islamist ideology still exerts deep influence?

Saudi-Israeli cooperation continues quietly on security and technology, but that is insufficient to advance US strategic interests.

Public normalization would force Saudi Arabia more firmly into the American orbit, blunt jihadist ideology, and consolidate a regional bloc capable of countering Iran and its proxies.

Trump wants Saudi Arabia in the Abraham Accords as part of his legacy. The path forward is leverage. Any sale of F-35s, a formal US defense treaty, or approval of a civilian nuclear program should be explicitly conditioned on normalization with Israel.

Strategic alignment should be earned, not assumed.
Seth Mandel: Hamas’s New Attempt to Fool Trump
The intent here seems to be to try to fool Steve Witkoff into selling this more convincingly to Trump. But let’s go back to the cease-fire terms: Hamas agreed to disarm, and the deal requires it.

Trump’s Mideast team surely wants a win, and they want to move on to attempting to build the Gaza dreamscape revealed by Jared Kushner last week. But if Hamas is permitted to fold 40,000 of its terrorists—including leadership and a 10,000-strong “police” force—into the new government, the dreamscape will be no closer now than it was before the war started.

Furthermore, where’s Europe on this? EU leaders should be outraged at Hamas. After all, Europe’s key demand is that whatever the specifics of the postwar process, they include a “path to Palestinian statehood.” Hamas opposes the two-state solution. Allowing Hamasniks to remain armed in Gaza is to foreclose a peace agreement.

Of course, they’ll pretend otherwise. Any relaxing of the requirements on the Palestinian side will be portrayed as “pro-Palestinian.” But in reality such maneuvers would be the opposite.

What does Hamas’s current “policing” look like? Is it images of Hamasniks rescuing kittens stuck in trees? Is it masked militiamen acting as crossing guards near elementary schools? Playing a charity softball game against the Gaza firemen?

Of course not. Hamas is cracking down on dissent and murdering civilians and rivals. After a few dozen were killed in October, CENTCOM Commander Brad Cooper warned Hamas “to immediately suspend violence and shooting at innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” Hamas was apparently unconvinced, so the next day Trump reiterated the message in his signature style: “If Hamas continues to kill people in Gaza, which was not the Deal, we will have no choice but to go in and kill them. Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Hamas hasn’t hid its crimes against Palestinian civilians; on the contrary, Hamas leaders know that they have to film themselves carrying out their barbaric acts because Western media won’t do it. At each pause in the Hamas-IDF fighting, videos of Hamasniks shooting civilians flooded social media. This is “policing”—and it is exactly what Hamas intends to do if given a green light.

So: Is it “pro-Palestinian” to leave Hamas in Gaza? Another way to word that question: Is it “pro-Palestinian” to shoot Palestinian civilians in the legs?

Trump has thus far held his ground on disarming Hamas. The terror group’s latest ploy should only reinforce the need to follow through on that.
Netanyahu: Israeli soldiers lost their lives in Gaza due to Biden-era arms embargo
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted Tuesday that some Israeli soldiers lost their lives in the war against Hamas because of what he called an “embargo,” that allegedly caused Israel to run out of ammunition.

He did not specify how many soldiers lost their lives for this reason, or precisely when it ostensibly happened. The premier did not directly name the Biden administration, but said that the “embargo” ended as soon as US President Donald Trump took office.

Netanyahu has repeatedly accused the Biden administration of instituting an embargo on arms supplies to Israel, notably in June 2024. Biden has denied withholding arms from Israel, apart from a batch of 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs amid concerns about how they would be used in the southern Gaza city of Rafah at that time.

Speaking at the very end of a lengthy press conference, in remarks that were not prompted by a question, Netanyahu said Israel paid “very heavy prices” in the war in terms of the loss of soldiers’ lives. While “part of that is what happens in war,” he said, part of it stemmed from the fact that “at a certain stage, we didn’t have enough ammunition.”

Soldiers at the time were fighting in areas where artillery and air force weaponry had been used, but terrorists had remained in booby-trapped houses, Netanyahu said.

“Heroes fell” because they didn’t have the ammunition they needed, he charged. And “part of that absent ammunition was because of the embargo.”

Netanyahu said he has resolved that this will never be allowed to happen again, and that is why he is determined to ensure that Israel has its own strong and independent arms industry, repeating his declaration from earlier this month that he hoped to make Israel less dependent on US military aid in the next decade.


Medical organizations so quick to condemn Israel look away from Iran
Medical organizations that were previously shouting allegations about Israel denying Palestinians basic medical care have become oddly silent regarding attacks by the Iranian government on hospitals. This selective mutism reveals that these organizations are not really concerned about the safe delivery of medicine, as they are in trying to score points against the State of Israel.

Just last year, the head of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Dr. Sue Kressley, wrote on behalf of her organization to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, raising alarms about the denial of pediatric medical care in Gaza. In particular, she objected to the detention by Israeli forces of Hussam Abu Safiya, a pediatrician and the head of Kamal Adwan Hospital, expressing concern that children in northern Gaza would no longer have access to pediatric emergency care or to Abu Safiya.

Kressley failed to note that Hussam Abu Safiya was also a colonel in Hamas and that Kamal Adwan was a military hospital, giving Israeli forces reason to detain Abu Safiya amid a military conflict.

Fast-forward to present-day Iran, and doctors are being detained by military forces, but this time, the doctors and the hospital are clearly civilian in nature. According to the news source ME24, “the Islamic Republic’s Ministry of Intelligence raided Milad Hospital in Isfahan, abducting several doctors who had been providing medical assistance to injured protesters. Their lives are now in serious danger.”
Iranian activist describes assassination attempts as 'badge of honour' | ITV News
There have been three separate attempts to assassinate Masih Alinejad, an Iranian activist and journalist.

In an interview with ITV News, she says Iran has now reached its “Berlin Wall moment” after hundreds of thousands of people protested on the street – thousands were then killed for participating in demonstrations.

Ms Alinejad has said that what the country needs now is democracy, and that despite the violence, she is optimistic about Iran’s future.

“We lost our family and friends, but not hope. This is the end of the Islamic Republic,” she told ITV News Global Security Editor Rohit Kachroo.




Restricted video
Iran International put together this documentary set in Tehran's Kahrizak Morgue.
It contains evidence of genocidal acts, documenting thousands of murdered Iranians dumped ruthlessly here by the regime.

Reminder that this is only one site in one city.


PIJ knowingly fired faulty rockets in Gaza, killing 'a thousand' Palestinians, document reveals
Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza knowingly launched defective rockets throughout the course of the Israel-Hamas War, killing 'a thousand' Gazans, KAN Reshet Bet reported on Tuesday, citing a document recovered from the Gaza Strip.

The Foreign Ministry later confirmed the authenticity of the document, sharing it on X/Twitter.

According to the report, the document, which contains a summary of a Beirut meeting between a Hamas official and Akram al-Ajouri, the head of PIJ’s al-Quds Brigades, was investigated by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center. The al-Quds Brigades is Palestinian Islamic Jihad's military wing.

According to the document, which reveals that Hamas leaders were upset that so many PIJ rockets were falling short inside of Gaza and killing Palestinians, reveals that Hamas viewed the problem as an issue damaging public perception within Gaza.

Ajouri: If a thousand are killed, that is the price of war
According to the document's transcript, Ajouri replied to the concern during the Beirut meeting, saying, "We are at war. And even if a thousand people are killed by friendly fire, that is the price of war."

KAN noted that the senior Hamas official mentioned in the document, codenamed “Ahmed,” told Ajouri, "Your rockets are falling on people's homes in broad daylight, and this has happened repeatedly."

Ahmed went on, saying that Hamas was not involved in the campaign to harm PIJ's public relations, and that, rather, the campaign was coming from the public within Gaza. Hamas official: If we are aware of the rocket malfunctions, the 'thousand deaths' are on our conscience

"Gaza has two million Facebook accounts, and everyone is acting like an activist," the transcript quotes Ahmed as saying. "As for the fact that a thousand people are killed by friendly fire, that would be understandable if it were against our will, without our prior knowledge that a fixable malfunction could lead to the deaths of a thousand. But if we had knowledge, then those thousand deaths are on the conscience of whoever kills them."

The document further revealed that both officials had been aware of the rocket malfunction issue since the 2014 Israel-Hamas conflict. Additionally, during the conversation, Ajouri admitted that the rockets were based on blueprints the organization received from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

PIJ’s rockets came under the international spotlight weeks after the start of the war in October 2023, when one of the organization’s rockets hit the al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza.

International media and terrorists in Gaza quickly blamed Israel for the incident, but it soon came to light that it was a PIJ rocket that struck the facility.


Call me Back Podcast: The Strike on Iran is Back on the Table - with Mark Dubowitz and Yonatan Adiri
Is a U.S. strike on Iran back on the table? How would it reshape the Middle East? And what role could the Middle East play in the new world order taking shape these days?

Dan Senor speaks with Mark Dubowitz and Yonatan Adiri about the rising likelihood of U.S. military action against the Islamic Republic, which targets are being considered, and how Iran could retaliate. They also unpack Israel’s internal debates on how to respond, the Saudi UAE rift and what it means for normalization, Turkey’s expanding footprint, and why India is becoming a more important regional player.

In this episode...
Is a U.S. strike on Iran coming and what would actually be hit
How Iran might retaliate and the debates inside Israel over next steps
Whether military action is meant to pressure the regime or help bring it down
Why Trump paused an attack and the regional forces shaping that call
Saudi Arabia’s recalculation, its rift with the UAE, and the impact on normalization
Turkey’s rise and why India is becoming a quiet power broker in the region




Tony Burke criticised over visa cancellations of people from Israel
Australian Jewish Association President Robert Gregory says his organisation has written to Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke over Israeli visa cancellations.

“I really think the Jewish community and the wider Australian community need to raise these issues,” Mr Gregory said.

“It seems like the Home Affairs Minister is deciding national security based on his electorate.”






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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

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